The Pig Comes to Dinner (14 page)

Kitty did. He wanted to stand at the parapet and proclaim himself master of all he surveyed. This, she felt, should be permitted, to prepare him for every disappointment possible when it would be revealed that, Shaftoe though he might be, the castle was Kitty's and would be Kitty's until she would consign her spent remains to the soil from which she'd sprung. Yes, he must take in the full view. But first, Taddy and Brid.

Kitty should have known. There they were, he with the harp, she at the loom. But only she and Kieran were to be granted the dispensation to see with mortal eyes the corporeal spirits that hovered and had their being. And clearly she had wronged her ghostly friends. By the time Kitty had fully entered the room, both Brid and Taddy had left their stations and were huddled in the far corner, Taddy's arm around a trembling Brid, whose hands were covering her neck as if to shield her wounds from the man passing through. They seemed helpless, unable to find refuge in shadow or in a mist.

“Forgive me,” Kitty said in Irish, intending her words for the ghosts. “I thought this would be different.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing,” she said, in English. “I mean—don't bother. I usually speak in my native tongue. Rude, of course, in the presence of the unschooled.”

His lordship raised
both
eyebrows and made the humming sound, accepting her admission of incivility if not her insult, and went with a newly determined step toward the stones that would lead him to the parapet.

Brid had stopped her trembling and Taddy had released his hold. Side by side they stood, with all the dignity of their sufferings stiffening their shadowed selves as the man passed them by, as unseeing as had been his ancestors whenever no service was needed or humiliations required.

Kitty considered herself monumentally stupid to have hoped that some susceptibility to guilt or remorse or even fear was possible for George Noel Gordon. Instead of guilt, the remorse, the fear were hers—and with some justice. New sufferings had she inflicted. Ancient wrongs had been made present again through an act of hers, but with no effect whatsoever on the man most deserving of their infliction, the Lord of the Castle, the Lord of the Land. The Landlord. Only Kitty and Brid and Taddy, descended from kings deposed, rightful heirs of lords and laborers, of those who had worked the land and fished the sea, only they were made to feel the ancient pain. And it was ever so.

His lordship had a bit of trouble lifting away the old wooden trapdoor that closed off the sky. Kitty offered to give it a shove, but he insisted. This was, after all, to be his castle. Its components must be made to submit.

They gained the battlements.

Off to the north the hills rose and fell, the modest mountains worn down by the inexorable ages, by wind and by rain, by every scourge the heavens had to offer, but rising still with a comforting solemnity against the sky. Green they were with low walls built stone by stone wrested one at a time from the earth, the walls parceling off one man's field from another man's pasture, giving way to commonage on the higher slopes that led to the summit. Massive white rocks lay easily in the sun, awaiting the next upheaval. Sheep, too, were placed without discernable pattern against the land, the herds moving at a glacial pace to fields considered yet more green. One glint, then another, flashed from the stream. The gray roads, bordered by riots of fuchsia and honeysuckle, threaded through. The slate roofs of the cottages were allowed to seem blue in the afternoon sun. A pickup truck and a bus were on their way to town, which consisted of a huddling of houses not visible even from this height.

Lord Shaftoe, standing at the battlement, negligible chin raised, took in the view, satisfied with what he saw. A slight breeze tried without success to lift the crumpled silk of his tie. As Kitty watched, he turned to the west, toward the sea. Two curraghs bobbed in the waters off Dunquin, and a ferry from Dingle was headed toward the Great Blasket, the island's slow upsweep a final mute thrust toward the mysteries of the sea itself.

Again Lord Shaftoe seemed approving of what lay before him. Or, it seemed to Kitty, he stood motionless as if he were a monarch accepting the homage and obeisance of his realm.

It came to Kitty then that she would come from behind and, with one great heave, lift and shove him down from the battlements onto the stones below. Dispatching him at this moment of high pride all the more ensured that his descent would not end at the foot of the tower but continue on into the netherworld.

The strength was growing in Kitty's back and in her arms. She could feel the roused muscles of her legs, the firming of her stomach. Her lungs, too, assured her of their ready assistance. All her being was summoned for the event. And look there! His lordship's chest was expanding. He was appropriating the air itself. A great wealth of purpose rose in Kitty's soul. The time was now.

But before she could make the fateful lunge, another prompting, Hamlet-like, presented itself. If she were to dispatch him now she would be robbing herself of the great moment that had been promised when his lordship would be, in the truer sense, cast down. When he would be told in terms irrefutable and beyond appeal that he had been misinformed, that he had indulged in illusions and encouraged imaginings. The castle was not to be his after all. It belonged in perpetuity to Kitty McCloud and Kieran Sweeney. Every word and gesture of this afternoon would return to him revised and vivified by this devastation. Could Kitty possibly deny herself the sight of his lordship divested of all his presumptions, denied all his delusions? The words written by her fellow Irish writer came quickly to mind: “Absent thee from felicity a while—”

Surrendering to the certainty of this greater satisfaction, Kitty dismissed the reinforcement that had brought her the added strength needed for her now abandoned purpose. From her back and legs she released the taut muscles. Her stomach was told to hang loose. And, while she was at it, she might as well unclench her teeth and allow the heated blood to drain from her cheeks.

When, however, his lordship turned toward her—but looking past rather than directly at her—and said, “Yes, this will all do very nicely,” Kitty found her strength returning and her blood rising all over again. Down he must go—and with not another minute permitted to pass.

But then, an interception: far, far out along the horizon, coming up out of the sea, was an empurpled cloud stretching from one end of the ocean to the other. The needed storm was on its way, the rumored drought was not to plague them after all. Rescue was at hand, advancing toward them over the waters of the deep. The curraghs were nosed toward Dunquin. The Dingle Ferry was on its own. She was returned to her second resolve. She'd wait. She'd savor. All in expectation of the tardy arrival of justice.

Kitty told the poor man to go ahead down the narrow stair, she would replace the trapdoor in its own idiosyncratic way now that the storm was coming. She was reasonably sure Brid and Taddy would not be at their tasks, and she was proved right. But, unnoticed by his lordship, the harp had been set on the stool and the shuttle placed safely on the frame of the loom. Whether she and Taddy were there in the growing shadows she could not tell, but when a quick flash of lightning flared in the room she thought she saw, off in the corner, Brid sitting on the other stool, her head bowed into her hands, her black, black hair falling over her knees. But in the great crash of thunder all was obliterated as a sudden dark filled the room.

Kitty, leading now, helped his lordship down into her workroom, having—at his request—to hold his fine-fingered hand as they descended. Just before they reached the final flight that would lead to the long hallway, the man said, “
Scarlet Feather
?”

Tonelessly Kitty said, “Maeve Binchy.”

“Oh yes. Of course. Very good it was, too.”

Through growing glooms Kitty led him along the gallery and into the great hall. By now the storm was in full flood, the thunder and lightning reveling in the mayhem.

“I don't suppose you have an extra umbrella?” his lordship asked.

Rather than tell a lie, Kitty simply said, “If you get wet, you'll get dry.”

With a small smile, indicating he had not the least idea what she meant, his lordship stepped out into the storm. As Kitty was closing the door she saw him raise his right hand, palm opened upward, to confirm the fact that it had indeed begun to rain on his lordly and unprotected head.

8

M
aude McCloskey, the Seer—or, to Kitty's preferred thinking, the Hag—had four children, the eldest away in Cork, the remaining at home when Kitty came to call. Two girls and one boy, they seemed to be aged five to nine for the girls with the boy stuck somewhere in between at about seven. They were sitting on the floor, a gray-green wall-to-wall carpet, playing cards. The turned-on television was close enough to suggest that the sports commentators going about their business could, if they chose, peer over the shoulder of the boy and the older girl, and read their cards.

At first Kitty guessed they were playing poker—cards were being dealt, discarded, laid out before them—but closer scrutiny informed her that those laid out had no recognizable relationship one to the other. It would have to be a game with which she was unfamiliar. But then it seemed possible that they'd made up the game themselves—perhaps improvising as they went along. Her next guess was that they were simply aping with their movements and comments what they had observed when their elders had played. But even that had to be revised when, from time to time, their mother would lean forward and direct the youngest, Ellen, to play a particular card, which she would then do, much to her advantage— and, rather surprising—to the amusement of her brother and sister.

They apparently accepted this as evidence of the girl's prowess, ignoring completely their mother's intervention. The older girl was called Margaret and the boy Peter—not because it was his name, but because his baptismal name was Stanislaus, the same as his father's, and the household could accommodate only one Stanislaus at a time. So the name Peter was brought in as substitute.

Kitty had come to ask the Hag how she might get rid of Brid. Kieran was, to Kitty's thinking, too far gone for rational measures to be of any use. Brid must therefore be dispatched as soon as possible. Kitty knew that great wrongs had been done to the girl, and that quiescence was impossible until some modicum of justice had been realized. But what act or actions might restore the needed moral balance was beyond Kitty's present powers. The miscreant, the Lord Shaftoe who had ordered the hangings, was long gone and, presumably, already judged by a power even higher than Kitty McCloud. To reach back into history and pluck him into the present seemed an unlikely achievement. What was required was nothing less than some reconciliation of things of earth with the things of heaven. Somewhere along the line, by whatever mixed signals, some earthly incompletion was let stand, or, quite possibly, ignored by the Eternal Conciliator Himself for reasons of His own. Or could it be that the present predicament had not yet come to the attention of the Supreme Arbiter? Or, worst of all, had everything long since been known by the Almighty but been dismissed as of no interest? Had it been decreed that, at some point, the lesser beings inhabiting a not very prominent planet should, on occasion, be required to figure things out for themselves? More intellectual equipment had been given to them than had been put to use. Divine inspiration shouldn't have to do all the work. Kitty should be able to discover the formula suited to her present needs. Her situation, after all, had not been imposed upon her. No one had told her to buy Castle Kissane. Nothing but her inborn recklessness, her overevolved urge toward risk, had suggested that she, Francis and Helen McCloud's little girl Caitlin, should install herself as chatelaine—and now she must pay the price beyond the euros already paid.

That, Kitty had no objection to doing. She'd been doing it since her wedding day, when Brid and Taddy announced their residency. But now human frailty, in the form of a husband, had intervened. Kitty had no fear of rivals—unless, of course, the rival was not only young and supremely beautiful but also predestined by the nature of the predicament to remain so while Kitty, with all her admitted advantages of looks and intelligence and talent, was subject nevertheless to the claims of time.

Brid must go. She, Kitty, would be doing her a favor. Brid deserved better than her current situation allowed. And Kitty, with characteristic kindness, would see to her release, as soon as truths as yet unvouchsafed were placed into her resolute hands. It was the Hag who must provide her with whatever clues she might possess, which accounted for Kitty's present visit.

“It's been a full week,” Mrs. McCloskey was saying, “since Peter's wet the bed, and we're crossing our fingers for another week. Ellen sleeping next to him is particularly pleased, since he would be wetting her as much as the bed. Are you sure you wouldn't like a bit of something else in your tea?” She began tipping a bottle of Tullamore Dew in the direction of Kitty's cup.

“No, this is fine. The tea's really quite good as it is.”

“Ah, yes. If there's one thing I know it's how to make a good cup of tea.” Hearing this, Kitty thought it impolite to mention that Peter had made the tea. And besides, Mrs. McCloskey was far advanced in the one topic she considered suitable entertainment: her children. “Now Margaret,” the woman went on, “Margaret there seems to be developing asthma like her aunt, but I've warned her it'd better be a chest cold because she could die of asthma with the next attack. Her aunt went just like”—she snapped her fingers— “same age as Margaret is now. So she's been duly warned.” She reached down, studied Ellen's cards, pulled one out, and placed it on the rug. Again Peter's and Margaret's pleasure at this stunning move was immediately apparent.